Bookish Gardener

Current reading: Front Yard Gardens

The weather in these parts is finally settling into seasonal cold, although there's no snow yet and, thanks to this fall's Indian-summer-doubleheader, the grass is still green. In the couple of months between now and the midwinter seed-startathon, I'll be spending a lot of time (1) reading garden books and catalogs until my optical prescription rivals that of Professor Frink, and (2) hatching schemes for converting more and more lawn area to garden space.

Front Yard Gardens: Growing More than Grass, by Liz Primeau, is what the title advertises--a book about how your front yard can evolve beyond the typical lawnscape into a welcoming garden environment--and more, in that the garden design principles it describes (in text) and illustrates (in stunning photography by Andrew Leyerle) could apply just as helpfully to side- and backyard gardens as well.

Front Yard Gardens features several dozen North American gardens, mostly in Canada (with many in Toronto, Edmonton and Winnipeg), but also including a couple of gardens in Austin, Texas and one in Appleton, Wisconsin. The book is organized by chapters that focus on a particular garden style, ranging from "cottage" to "minimalist" to "natural" (to name but a few), with detailed information about plant combinations and gardening technique. The writing is authoritative but personable, and includes extensive excerpts from the author's conversations with the gardeners of many of the featured gardens.

I read, with amusement and recognition, the author's tales of her husband's attachment to the lawn, which was one of the early obstacles to her own front yard garden:

I was itching to take up the rest of the grass and complete my dream garden [....] Of course I needed my husband's okay for the full monty -- to say nothing of his help. But he was turning out to be a hard sell. He was loath to give up his Saturday morning power outings [with the lawnmower....] He thought our small patch of green in the front looked just fine, and what would the neighbors say? Besides, when would we have the time to look after more garden?

Ah, yes. The husband with a lawn jones. (Working on it!)

Hence I'm filled with envy at Jamaica Kincaid's description, in My Garden (Book):, of how she set out creating the beds for her first garden, in utter freedom:

[...] Rob (Woolmington) came with his modest rototiller and made a largish square with it for my vegetable garden and then followed me around the outside perimeter of the house with the same modest rototiller as I directed him to turn up the soil, making beds in strange shapes, so that the house would eventually seem to be protected by a moat made not of water but the result of an enthusiastic beginning familiarity with horticulture.

Front Yard Gardens is a great read, whether you approach it at the level of just paging through it to admire the photographs, or whether you hone in on a specific garden style in a particular chapter to try to absorb all that goes into how to get there. Although it's a beautiful book, it's not at all the typical coffee-table garden book in which you might feel you're gazing on the unapproachable and unattainable. I'm inspired to think: I can do this! (Once I get Spousal Unit to come around.)

My Garden (Book):. Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. ISBN 0-374-52776-8 (paperback).

Front Yard Gardens: Growing More than Grass. Liz Primeau. Firefly Books Ltd., 2003. ISBN 1-55297-710-2 (paperback).

Oh, really?

Rosa rugosa, one of the oldest species of rose, had five petals and pentagonal symmetry, just like the guiding star of Venus, giving the Rose strong iconographic ties to womanhood.

The DaVinci Code was this weekend's reading. I don't pick up many books from the best-seller lists, but this happened to be this month's selection for our neighborhood book club. Quick read, not much there there. The protagonist is a two-dimensional haircut-of-a-man (...wonder which Hollywood type will get to bring him to life [so to speak] on the big screen). Absent character development, clever wordplay and rapid-fire plot twists keep the book moving, but at the end of it all I'm left with the feeling that I've sat through a very lengthy spiel by a charismatic flim flam man. (So Dark The Con Of Man, indeed.)

It looks like a number of articles and reviews have pointed out the considerable liberties taken with religious, cultural and art historical details in the book. Here's another. The quote above is intended to explain the Priory of Sion's adoption of the rose as a symbol for the Holy Grail. The Priory was founded in 1099. Rosa rugosa (native to the Far East) was not introduced to Europe until 1796, when it was brought to England.

It's just coincidence, not synchronicity, that I've spent a chunk of today, the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination, reading a book in the tradition of conspiracy theory. I'm left as unsatisfied by it as I was by Oliver Stone's movie. Must re-read Foucault's Pendulum. (Conspiracy theory. Doin' it right.)

"Sweet Potato" Lagniappe (Updated)

One of my last chores, bringing closure to the season, is to clean out our south-facing windowboxes. They've been blooming and blooming and blooming since May, with Frillytunia petunias (home grown from seed), store-bought bedding 'Tahiti'-mix snapdragons, and 'Marguerite' and 'Blackie' sweet potato vines from mail-ordered plugs. The petunias and snaps have kept on going well after the early October frost that pretty much decked the sweet potato vines, but (even though they probably had at least a few more weeks' life left in them) it was time to move them along. The petunias were clearly suffering from not having been deadheaded since the end of summer, and had become leggier than Twiggy due to my irrational inability to cut them back even once during their six months of vigorous growth. Lesson learned for next year: I hereby vow to get rid of my "Every Bloom Is Sacred" mindset (or, I'll at least try to coax myself into cutting back alternate stems if I find my resolve shaky):

Every bloom is sacred,
Every bloom is great;
If a bloom is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I had a momentary frisson of confusion when I found a red lump in the potting soil. It was a...potato? What's a potato doing in the window box? Beat. Oh, a sweet potato...from the sweet potato vine (or, rather, the other way around). Sure enough, the window boxes have yielded the unexpected bounty pictured above. In some variation on ginseng root, which (much like the "man" in the moon) often seems to grow in the image of the human body, these tubers seem to look like either seal pups, manatees or water fowl. I don't think I'll be frying these up for supper, since these aren't really potato relatives. The botanical name is Ipomoea batatas...yes, as in morning glory ipomoea. Instead, I'll chop up the tubers and try to start some new plants for indoors until next May...then back out to the window boxes.

Update:
Turns out these would be edible after all...Ipomoea batatas is sweet potato (yes, the kind we eat--it's not just a euphemism). (But not yam, which is Dioscorea species. A li'l bit of trivia: "yams" sold in supermarkets are actually sweet potatoes, and, if they're following US Department of Agriculture regulations, you'll find that the labels for "yams" will include the words "sweet potato".)

Back from break soon.

Working on getting back into the groove after being a little under the weather. (I fought the cold and the / cold won.) Perfect for a sick day -- the episode of Columbo now airing on Bravo is "Try and Catch Me", with guest star murderer Ruth Gordon, who plays a brilliant mystery writer who matches wits with the good lieutenant. Her hapless victim is played by Charles Frank, who will always be Dr. Jeff Martin to us who watched All My Children during the Ford and Carter administrations. (There's no Jeff Martin bloodline extant in Pine Valley at this point, but we'll always fondly remember him as the first of Erica Kane's ten marriages; or applying the Elizabeth Taylor conversion factor for repeated weddings to the same fella, the first of eight husbands.) Ruth Gordon is fabulous in this intricately plotted and wonderfully acted episode. Also notable is Mariette Hartley as the mystery writer's shrewd, belly-dancing personal assistant named Veronica (one of my favorite names, so much so that my youngest bears it...although her name wasn't inspired by the Columbo character, but by this song and its singer). Once I extricate myself from the land of mixed metaphors and nonsequiturs, I hope to resume regular, relevant posting. Thanks for your patience.

For entertainment purposes only.

I've got a million things to do on this damp, gray morning. There's only one thing to do, then: waste some time having some mindless, useless fun. This is a skill well-honed over my adult life, starting with my days as an undergraduate in the seventies, where I would typically put off, say, writing a paper on the Emile (translated from the French by "Ravelstein") by doing my natal chart by hand, revealing sun and Mars in Libra, rising sign and Venus in Virgo, and moon in Capricorn. (The astrological profile didn't say, but should have said: "You believe that you have gone grocery shopping when you come home with a pint of Haagen Dazs, the current issue of Vogue, and a box of Meow Mix. You have too many books, and you need to do the dishes.")

Advances in technology into this new millennium have now provided us with ever more efficient means of procrastination. So...what do the personality quizzes say this morning? (Except for the final quiz below, these are all courtesy of Quizilla.)

80's song: I'm "When Doves Cry" by Prince. (The rest of the field: Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams"; AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long"; Nena's "99 Red Balloons"; and RunDMC's "It's Tricky".) Yeah, I can live with this.

Japanese name: My name is Ichi ("the one with wisdom"). A few complaints: this particular quiz doesn't show the other alternatives; and the name is written in hiragana (one of the two Japanese phonetic "alphabets") rather than kanji (the Chinese character equivalent). The kanji would have given some interesting insight into the meaning of the name (I'm not quite willing to take "the one with wisdom" on faith). As it is, "ichi" is cognate with the character for the Japanese number one. Which, to think about it, may fit as I'm the oldest daughter of four children, which makes me a "maht-ttal" in Korean--a special term for the first child, if the child is female. It's also cognate with the character for "sun" or "day", which sorta fits with my middle name ("Myong" in Korean, "Akira" in Japanese), which is the Chinese character consisting of the character for "sun" next to the character for "moon". Whoa, Nellie...starting to channel Amaravati here.

Personality disorder: I have an avoidant personality. (The rest of the field: paranoid; histrionic; obsessive compulsive; narcissistic; anti-social; schizoid; schizotypal; dependent; borderline.) Whew, I guess.

Mythological form: I am the phoenix. (The rest of the field: goddess; angel; vampire; unicorn; gargoyle; dragon; elfin; gryphon; demon.) Spot-on! The symbol of my alma mater.

Author's fiction: Flannery O'Connor wrote my book. (The rest of the field: Anne Rice; Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway; Jane Austen; William Gibson; William Faulkner; Robert Heinlein.) This is, hands down, my favorite result.

And finally...although I fully intend that this blog be a politics- and current-events-free zone, Colby Cosh's recent infliction of a typically elegant, and mortal, blow to the popular "Political Compass" quiz renders the quiz, in my view, now safe "for entertainment purposes only". For what it's worth, then, I show up close to the center, in the lower right-hand quadrant. My avoidant personality is pleased to see that I do not share this quadrant with any globally known figures.

Back to work, then. (Sigh.)

Current reading: Time and the Gardener

Elisabeth Sheldon is a gardener and writer now in her eighties. Her new book, Time and the Gardener: writings on a lifelong passion, confronts (in text as well as in title) the bittersweet backdrop in which gardens and their gardeners come and go, which is that the nature of this enterprise is, after all, only ephemeral.

I was moved to pick up this book by the title, the gorgeous Pierre Joseph Redoute illustration of nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) on the cover, the fact that the author once studied at my alma mater, and (let's face it) because I had a gift card given to me on the occasion of my recent birthday which could subsidize the new-book, hardcover price.

It's a delightful read, and is going immediately into my "re-read" stack. Delightful, none the less for the author's matter-of-fact discussion of facing time as it both ravages and dwindles. I myself go back and forth on the question of whether it's better for the body to "go" before the mind, or the mind before the body. What we all probably hope for--a natural leaving that takes one from health to death in an instant--is mostly a matter of luck, although both my grandmothers were so lucky. Elisabeth Sheldon's thoughts on this topic:

What I object to is the steady process of gradual dilapidation: now it's the knees, then the back, and in my case the eyes. In the new system I would propose we would all go vigorously full speed ahead until our time was up, then fall suddenly on our faces, finished. Montaigne, the essayist, said he hoped Death would find him planting cabbages. I myself would like to meet Death in the flower garden--falling facedown onto a cushion of Dianthus gratianopolitanus, if it's not too much to ask.

Like the best gardening writing, this book teaches with the tone of "I'm still learning too", giving great comfort to those who couldn't keep their Caryopteris clandonensis alive either (ahem). She discusses extensively, and helpfully, the adventure of raising plants from seed (gathered and exchanged, as well as purchased), and makes this arena of gardening experience (which can be daunting and intimidating) accessible and hopeful. As for the rest of the book, I could go on and on about the beauty of her writing, which is clear while infused with character, and the wealth of knowledge she generously passes on in stories about her failures as well as successes...but this would only be a feeble echo of the chorus of praises found on the dust jacket, sung by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, and Diane Ackerman, among other luminaries.

I've had the good fortune to meet, and be inspired by, a number of gardeners who are women in their seventies and eighties, and have come to the conclusion that (don't give away this secret!) gardening is some sort of fountain of youth. Like these women, Elisabeth Sheldon exemplifies the vigor and the vision that I aspire to achieve for however long it is that I'm graced to be around.

Time and the Gardener: writings on a lifelong passion. Elisabeth Sheldon. Beacon Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8070-8556-1.

8:50 AM, 28 degrees Fahrenheit.

Winter wind...
Whispers to you that he wants to be your friend
But not waiting for your answer he begins
Forcing dangers 'way with his breeze.

--Stevie Wonder, "Summer Soft", from Songs in the Key of Life

Or, as we say around here, Mow this week, Snow next week. (Hey--at least it's not "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.")

Dean Riddle's Beautiful Life Story

What's your vision of a beautiful life?

What if, in the moment before you're given earthly existence, the Creator has a little sit-down with you to show you what's in store (...after which, of course, you're conveniently zapped with that memory eraser thing from MiB).

Let's say that this is what you're shown: You'll grow up in a small town in the American South. You'll be male, and you'll be gay. You'll have a loving family, with a mother that you'll call "Mama" and a father that you'll call "Daddy" even after they've long since passed on. You'll have the chance to meet many people, although you will nurse through final illness many of those that you've come to love the most. You'll have the chance to live in many places, although you won't find the place that feels like your true home until you're into your thirties. From the day of your earliest memory, and perhaps every day thereafter, you will notice, remember and love gardens, plants and flowers.

In Out in the Garden: Growing a Beautiful Life (ISBN & other details at the bottom of this earlier post), Dean Riddle unfolds for us his happy life, echoed in the beauty of the gardens he's created at his home in the Catskills in upstate New York. It's an artful autobiography, as it avoids the diaristic "...and then...and then...and then" litany of name-dropping reminiscences (such as found in bestsellers spawned by big publishing advances and armies of ghostwriters); it's an artful autobiography because it paints a picture with carefully selected stories of people, places and experiences, each meaningfully making a point which might otherwise come off as aphoristic but for being heartfully lived and true: Money doesn't buy happiness. Happiness is not the absence of pain. Life is short. Death is part of life. Life is beautiful.

I'm in awe of Dean Riddle's plantsmanship--the gardening knowledge in this book alone would make this a worthwhile read--but that's for another post. For now, I just want to appreciate his appreciation, throughout the book, of the loved ones that have gone before him and whom he remembers, evocatively and generously. His "Granny", with forgiveness. His "Mama" and "Daddy", with love and heartfelt loss. "Mick", a fellow student at Hillier Nurseries in England, killed young in an electrical accident. "Sonny", who grew Comtesse de Bouchard clematis and left Riddle his copy of Hortus Third. "Courtney", who dies of AIDS the day after Tom Hanks' Oscar win for Philadelphia. "Mark", who, a short time before dying at twenty-nine, tells Riddle, "Maybe someday I'll be able to see you and your flowers when I move on to the great beyond."

I love this book. I think you will too.

He said: You must be joking, son--where did you get those shoes?

Motley notes from our Halloween Eve jaunt to Mall of America. It's an easy (interstate with hardly any metro area traffic snarls) and pleasant (mostly unspoiled scenery of trees, rivers and geologic formations) four-hour drive away. We're not really shoppers, but thought the mall's indoor amusement park would be an economical (read: cheap) Disneyland-substitute for our three kids. We called it right.

Even after adjusting our price-point sensitivity to captive-audience levels, we couldn't see the, uh, logic of paying three bucks for a pretzel from Pretzel Logic, but were pleased to find that we could settle for the alternative of a Tazo iced tea in Starbucks' largest size (...in the land where "tall" means "small", large is called, what..."Gargantua?" "Brobdignagian?"), for under two bucks.

Junk food nirvana: Krispy Kremes, fresh from the in-store bakery. The "plain" dozen we got were almost hot to the touch, and melted in the mouth. (When you fall off Atkins, this best be the first thing in your mouth.) Background music in this shopping mall donut shop: a compilation of vaguely-familiar/vaguely-obscure British invasion tunes. (I'd buy that soundtrack!) Muzak is dead, and not a moment too soon.

The mall's shuttle bus driver passed along the stat that it would take 88 hours to pay a ten-minute visit to each of the mall's 525 stores. However, the mall is just a mall, and it turned out that the subset of stores that (a) were of any interest to me and (b) didn't already have locations in our area, totaled only two: the M-A-C counter at Nordstrom, and the Aerosoles store. At the former, refreshed my makeup collection with the help of an extraordinarily competent, and tattooed, sales clerk; at the latter, found two pairs of winter shoes embodying the oxymoronic: stylish, and rubber-soled.

Weird epiphany: I see an adult-sized Darth Vader costume in the display window of the mall's novelty/costume shop, and, in an admission that surely qualifies me for lifetime membership in the "slow on the uptake" club, realize that it's taken me only a quarter-century to figure out that (in the ersatz mythologizing of Star Wars) Darth is Don Giovanni's Il Commandatore, no?

Around dinnertime, our 4- and 6-year old were back for their Nth round on the merry-go-round and, since the crowds had thinned, had their pick of carousel animal. My 4-year-old climbed aboard the white rabbit she'd had her eye on all day. We had a deep philosophical discussion:

Daughter: --I like the white rabbit. Me: --You know Mommy doesn't like rabbits, don't you? Daughter: --Why don't you like rabbits? Me: --Because they eat Mommy's plants. Daughter: --You know what I think you should do? You should just scare them away.

Followed by a most happy ride (proving that even rabbit-lovers and rabbit-haters can coexist amicably).

On the other side of the carousel, her older brother had chosen this beauty, which harkens back to the days when carousel animals were more art than kitsch:

But not all of us were lucky that day. My husband (whom we shall affectionately refer to herein as ".mac"-head) regarded this trip, in no small part, as the opportunity for a pilgrimage to "The Apple Store", and his first chance to see, feel, touch (and be healed by) the new G5 and Panther. "Honey," I said, "I heard that eight hundred people were lined up in Minneapolis for Panther last week." And "Honey," I said, "I heard that even Microsoft is using G5s--though the guy who spilled the beans on them got canned." Appetite whetted, location on mall map circled, my husband made the trek...only to be greeted by a construction barricade. "It's getting better all the time" the slogan on the barricade chirped. The store was closed for renovations until mid-November.

DisapPOINTed!

When life presents these little setbacks, sometimes we try to cope by looking for some deeper meaning, some higher purpose. "It's a Sign," my husband said. A message that it was time to go over to the Dark Side. By day's end, though, he was just plain dejected: "Five hundred twenty-five f[ill in the blan]kin' stores in this mall, and the only one I want to go to is closed." Apropos of the site and the occasion, this was Charlie Brown finding a rock in his trick-or-treat bag.

I'm so sorry, sweetie.